Strengths-Based Leadership: A Critical Review to Guide Future Research

Abstract

Employee strengths use is associated with increased work engagement and reduced sickness absenteeism, and knowledge about how leaders can promote employee strengths use is rapidly developing. We performed a systematic review to a) summarize what is known about the conceptualization, operationalization, and nomological net of strengths-based leadership and about the relation between leadership and employee strengths use, and b) identify concerns to set an agenda to guide future research on the topic. Our literature search through Web of Science and Scopus resulted in 39 empirical, peer-reviewed English articles published between 1998, often marked as the start of the positive psychology approach, and 2024. The most important issue resulting from our review is that although there is a common understanding of what constitutes strengths-based leadership, conceptualizations and operationalizations diverge. We call for more research including a broader diversity of samples to 1) further investigate the psychometric properties of strengths-based leadership scales, such as their construct, convergent, and discriminant validity, and measurement invariance, and 2) expand the theoretically grounded nomological network surrounding strengths-based leadership.